‘The Race to Awesome’ got the hashtag out there, with two tweet-powered trains (#TheNorth and #TheSouth) racing against each other to an imaginary destination – AWESOME. The first to arrive won two of its supporters unlimited First Class weekend train travel for a year.

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Making everyone fall back in love with train travel

The majority of comments on Virgin Trains' social channels had always been journey complaints - but following our campaign, positive sentiment in social media increased 3-fold. We had6,700 entries to our Twitter competition - trouncing the 1000 forecast. And saw a 240% increase in email CTR - 50 people even tweeted about them!

We got bums on seats too, with 10,800 new customers added to the database during the initial campaign period, bringing £2.4m in additional revenue.